My kitchen has a lot of cast iron cookware in it. Five skillets of various sizes and a 5-quart dutch oven meet most of my sautéing, roasting, and even baking needs. I love cast iron for its ability to go from burner to oven without any problem. Also for its heat retention and the evenness of heat distribution.

The main virtues in cast iron are thermal mass and conductivity. High thermal mass means that cast iron is able to absorb a lot of heat and hold it before delivering it to the food you are cooking in it. Iron is heavy and dense. If you had an aluminum pan of the exact same size and shape as a cast iron dutch oven, it would not hold nearly as much heat, and would cool down much more quickly as food was added to it. So when it's time to sear beef cubes as you begin to cook a stew, a pre-heated cast iron pan will contribute some of the heat stored in it directly to the meat and still have enough heat in reserve to stay hot. Cast iron has so much thermal mass that a large enough skillet can mimic the effects of an Asian wok with several thousand BTU's underneath it. In other words, cast iron can store a lot of heat and deliver it steadily to foods.

The conductivity of cast iron allows the whole cooking surface to be of a uniform temperature under most conditions. That means that if you're cooking a lot of onions, there won't be any hot spots where some onions begin to burn while the rest of them remain colorless. Unless you actually try to heat only one part of the pan, by heating just one edge of it, the superb conductivity of cast iron will distribute the heat evenly all over.

The Lodge Dutch Oven is most commonly associated with the long, slow cooking of stews, either at home on a burner, or over a campfire. Since I've moved to where winter is a real season to be reckoned with, I have made more proper stews in a year than I have in five years previously. The dutch oven is certainly the tool for this job. The deep sides contain a lot of the splatter when searing cubes of meat before the simmering stage. The excellent heat distribution allows a stew to cook properly at a bare simmer over the lowest flame. Little conical nibs on the underside of the dutch oven lid allow points for steam to condense, collect, and drip back down into the food. Many other sorts of metal lids collect water around the edges, which isn't beneficial to a stew.

But my dutch oven contributes most often when I make no knead bread. I little expected, when I began to make bread, that this heavy kettle would have much to do with my baking. Yet I use it at least once per week for this purpose. The dutch oven has no difficulty at all in withstanding the very high oven temperatures I bake at. Because the handle is a solid piece of metal, the lid can also preheat in the oven without any problem. It's in baking that the tight fit of the lid becomes most important. When I settle the lid on top, I know that there's a good tight seal to keep moisture inside the oven. My bread steams itself, counter-intuitively producing a thick, crispy, chewy crust.

The tight fitting lid comes in handy again when refreshing remainders of homemade loaves that have gotten dried out (but not moldy). I completely submerge whatever bread is left in water, put it in the oven in my preheated dutch oven for about 10 minutes, and take it out of the oven, keeping it sealed up for another 10 minutes or so. With the good vapor seal provided by the lid, the steam softens and rehydrates the bread, which is then good enough for toast.

On the rare occasions that I want to deep fry anything in my kitchen, I again haul out my dutch oven. I learned through trial and error that copper clad stainless steel pans will not hold heat well enough to keep hot oil at anything like a temperature, unless I use an enormous amount of oil. Deep frying anything is a very occasional treat in my home, and I usually try to use as little oil as possible when frying, because I know I'm not going to have any further use for the oil when I'm done frying with it. Using the dutch oven lets me use a fairly small amount of oil, and yet keep the temperature of the oil steady. When I drop in a few apple fritters, the oil temperature takes only a slight dip in my cast iron dutch oven, as opposed to the 100 degree drop I saw in my Revereware pans.

The 5-quart size is probably the best size dutch oven for most homes. Unless your family is very large, 5 quarts of food is enough for an ample meal and several days of leftovers. If you wish to bake with a dutch oven, the 5-quart size is also optimal for loaves of bread, again unless you regularly need to feed a lot of people. There is a 3-quart size which might do for those who only want to cook small quantities of food at a time. But I would always prefer to just make a smaller amount of food in a larger pot, rather than restrict my options by investing in the smaller dutch oven.

Cleaning the dutch oven by hand is pretty easy once a good seasoned surface has developed. The only difficulty in washing up is the heavy weight of the pot. There's no denying that iron is heavy. So someone with carpal tunnel or motor control problems might have to avoid cast iron in general. Fortunately, baking no knead bread doesn't dirty the dutch oven at all. When the bread is baked, I just brush the oat bran or cornmeal that coated the loaf out of the pot. The loose bits fall right out of the dutch oven, and there's no residue and nothing else to clean.

I would unhesitatingly recommend the Lodge brand to anyone interested in having a dutch oven for kitchen or camp use. There is a nearly indestructible quality to all well made cast iron, and I have always found Lodge products to be very well made. I am perfectly happy with mine, and I expect it to last beyond my lifetime.


Some of my other favorite kitchen tools:

• Oxo Good Grips Offset Bread Knife - does its job well and safely
• Oxo Good Grips Kitchen Tongs - sturdy and safe to use with non-stick pans
• Swing Away Can Opener - the one I kept after trying all the others
• Taylor Instant Read Pocket Thermometer - the most necessary tool for cooking roasts of any kind
• KitchenAid Standing Mixer - indispensable for certain kitchen tasks, and incredibly strong
• KitchenAid Santoku knife - a nice intersection of a chef's knife and a utility knife
• Cuisinart Mini-Mate Food Processor - grind those spices or make pesto in a trice
• Endurance Precision Pierced Colander - drains like a dream, and made of stainless steel
• Lodge Cast Iron Dutch Oven - ideal for stews and no knead bread
• Magnabar Knife Holder - extra storage space for my best kitchen tools



Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 40